Our builders have been hard at work for the last few days, and the fruits of their labours are evident. Where there once was a chimney, there’s now half a pile of rubble (which has now been moved – some to save, but a lot for the skip).

Looking down from upstairs

The change in the room is already pronounced, and we can see the huge change that this will have to the available space, particularly when the doorway is blocked up and so the room isn’t doubling up as a corridor.

The doorway on the left in this picture will be blocked off.

When we were clearing out the cellar, we found a box of spare parquet bricks, so when the chimney is gone completely we will be able to fill in the gap with matching bricks. We will be sanding back the floor (when all the brick dust is gone!) and bringing back the natural wood colours, but that job seems far off when we are looking at a pile of bricks!

My grandparents had a gas fire in their living room. This always caused great distress at Christmas – how would Father Christmas get in? Would he get stuck? Grandma solved this problem by showing us that the front door was left unlocked before we went to bed and the stockings we left by the hearth (presumably because that’s where Father Christmas was expecting them to be) were filled when we woke up in the morning.

Father Christmas would definitely have issues here, even ignoring all the pipework that’s behind the gas fire front.

The problem with the chimney, however, is the structure – which is fine downstairs, but runs from the cellar, up through the living room and then right through the centre of the bedroom upstairs. The result of this is that you can’t fit a double bed in the bigger bedroom upstairs, though you can (and we did) fit a single bed in each corner of the room.

An impossible jigsaw puzzle.

My grandparents had their bedroom downstairs, so this was never a problem for them, but we plan to use the upstairs room as our bedroom, so removing the chimney has been one of the first priorities of the build. The removal has been done this week, which is quite exciting, so we’ll share some pictures when we visit next week.